There is something decidedly wrong about finding the Irish stand-up comic Ed Byrne perched on a big sit-on lawn mower. This, for heaven’s sake, is the regular from BBC2’s Mock the Week, whose shtick is to eff and blind his way through a torrent of exasperation at everything about everyday life he finds ludicrous or pretentious. You would expect to find him ripping into sit-on mowers – and their owners’ obsession with perfectly striped lawns – rather than sitting on one, looking, it must be said, rather pleased with himself.

“Well, the mower was just a car substitute,” says Byrne, 36, leading the way back to the house. “I have only just learnt to drive and the mower was something to play on before I became legal. Now I can’t stop.”

The address is all wrong, too. We are walking through a sizeable garden, complete with swimming pool, deep in stockbroker-belt Hertfordshire. This is John Major’s fantasy England of village greens, country pubs and little old ladies cycling to church. What is the Perrier-award nominee and Edinburgh Fringe favourite doing here?

Byrne, after all, is the enfant terrible who, the last time we met, related tales of his flat in Muswell Hill, a place so squalid that people who gate-crashed his parties would stop him in the street two weeks later and berate him for owning such a tip. The guy who used to boast about how, when he shared with his fellow comedian Ross Noble in London, each of their flats became infested with rats. He was particularly proud of their infestation at Finsbury Park because the flat was on the third floor, and he reasoned that the rats must have gone out of their way to choose to live with them, making it the Claridge’s of the rodent world. In short, the last person on earth you’d expect to quit the big city and settle down in the countryside. So, what is he doing here?

“I live here because I love it here,” says Byrne, who – surprisingly perhaps – studied horticulture at Strathclyde University before dropping out in the second year and making his way to the capital and the comedy circuit. “In fact, I love everything about the countryside. I do real country things like screwing up paper to make firelighters and chopping up logs. I’ll actually go looking for places that sell logs big enough for me to chop up. Logs that are already chopped up are no fun.”

So saying, he shows me around the house itself – a century-old, five-bedroom, detached property that, Land Registry records reveal, he bought for £590,000 almost two years ago. Pleasant and roomy, without being in the least ostentatious, it still bears the postoperative scars of a renovation job that cost, according to Byrne, “about a third of the value of the house”.

The project was overseen by Claire Walker, his girlfriend of five years, whom he married in June, with his fellow comedian Dara O’Briain as the best man. Essentially, it involved ripping out the kitchen, which was, Claire says, “picturebook pine”, and replacing the pink and chintz in the living room with a chunkier look. The couple have gone in for American oak in a big way, laying down new boards throughout the ground floor, installing a staircase, adding double-glazed french doors and rejigging the upstairs rooms.

Claire, 36, chatters about the kitchen conversion, which coincided with both sets of parents meeting, prewedding, for the first time. “We had a cooker and a microwave, but no running water at all in here,” she says. “But everyone got on brilliantly. It was kind of the spirit of the Blitz.”

That’s all very homely, but how does living in the sticks affect Byrne’s stand-up? Cutting-edge comedy doesn’t usually emerge from rural idylls.

“Living here has influenced my new show a lot,” he says. “The countryside is full of class issues. Like, if a pheasant flies into the side of the house and dies, eating that pheasant is kind of a pikey thing to do. But if I go out and shoot a pheasant, then that’s okay. Isn’t that weird? There are all sorts of class contradictions like that. Now excuse me while I trim the wisteria off the satellite dish. See, that’s another one.”

We wander on from the kitchen, through the adjoining dining room and upstairs to Byrne’s office and mini-library. If further proof be needed that he is serious about the joys of the great outdoors, it is here: a huge map of Scotland hangs on the wall, with the Munro hills marked by crosses.

Byrne got into walking in the Munros just this March, and is obsessed by them. There are 284 in all and he has climbed 12 already, some in the early mornings prior to gigs at the Edinburgh Festival. He plansto tackle the others as well. “I love the isolation up there,” he says. “I may not think of a single joke, but it clears the head.”

Downstairs again, the low-ceilinged living room is the showpiece. The fireplace was Byrne’s idea; he saw a similar one in a magazine. It is a slab of seemingly free-standing concrete, polished to a shine so it looks like granite, with a wood-burning stove on top.

So, let me get this straight: the stand-up comedian who, before the cigarette ban came into force, used to deliver his act with a pint of lager in one hand and a Marlboro Red and a microphone in the other, now reads glossy magazines about interiors, then does some nifty home improvements himself . . . I wonder what his fellow panellists on programmes such as Have I Got News for You, Never Mind the Buzzcocks or 8 out of 10 Cats would make of that.

“You know, this is the only house I have lived in that I have been happy to come home to,” Byrne says. “Previously, I preferred being away on tour, living in hotels, because the hotels were better than the dumps I lived in. It feels kind of grown-up living here. This is the house that jokes built. It is a good feeling.” He definitely isn’t joking this time.

Ed Byrne is on a national tour until April. For details, visit www.edbyrne.com

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